DivThemes has come out with divFinite, a professional looking simple and clean wordpress blog theme.

divFinite comes with a lot of backend options (you can see the backend sample image on their site) which makes anything from changing theme colors/text to generating automatic thumbnails a breeze.

Awesome Features :

1. Theme Control Panel (Solid backend coding)
2. Easy Private Ad Management (Ads can be uploaded from the backend and managed there)
3. Featured article spot
4. 7 Widget Ready Spots
5. 3 Footer widget spots
6. Threaded Comments Support
7. Footer Widgets
8. Dual Layout Styles
9. Custom Colors ( All colors on the theme can be changed from the backend )
10. Custom Typography ( Supports Cufon. Upload a font and it is automatically applied to your theme )
11. Twitter Integration
12. Automatic Thumbnail Generation ( Auto fetches images from your post; defaults if none )
13. Header/Footer Logos  (Again, can be uploaded from the backend )
14. Add Google Analytics code from Backend  ( Basically no theme code edits required at all )
15. Author InfoBox below Posts
16. Easy Feedburner Integration

Click here to check out the DEMO

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You must have seen it mentioned at many a places. The WP-Supercache plugin by Donncha is indeed effective in bringing down the load on your server. This comes especially handy if you are hosted on a Shared hosting which will probably Suspend your account if your blog takes up a lot of CPU for more than a specified time.

Here are the results for blogulate.com on MediaTemple.

W/O Supercache : 20.08 GPUs
W Supercache : 13.61 GPUs

Get the plugin here.

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users, but because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment those requests are handled by PHP.

WordPress Enthusiasts have a reason to rejoice. WP 2.9 will be out in a couple of weeks. There are a host of changes planned.
Major new features for developers:
- comments meta table
- improved support for custom post types
- register_theme_directory() for additional theme locations
- back-ported JSON encode/decode for both PHP and JavaScript

and for users:
- oEmbed support
- “Trash” for posts, pages and comments (Delete/Recover from Trash: Quite like Joomla)
- post thumbnails support
- basic image editor

The Whole list of planned changes can be seen on the official page